Bill Watkins listens to all the whales in the North Pacific Ocean

Abstract

In the early 1990s portions of the Navy’s classified underwater listening systems (IUSS) were made available for research. Bill Watkins had long been familiar with this system and eagerly went to work listening to whales in the North Pacific Ocean. A decade later the work that Bill Watkins has amassed, and its impact on marine mammal research, is truly remarkable. Each month Bill’s team produces a summary of hundreds, if not thousands, of whale calls detected and localized using the Navy’s listening arrays. These data have pinpointed seasonal centers of vocal activity in unexpected places, leading to changes in our strategies for monitoring several populations of endangered large whales. Bill has tracked the migratory paths of blue, fin, and humpback whales and has charted the shifts in migratory timing caused by climatic phenomena such as ENSO. Bill has taken a complex technology created for other purposes and crafted a process to get it to deliver simple, clear, and unclassified information for an entire ocean: we have not yet plumbed the limits of what we can do with this information.